3.
***
Lynette Randall's day started with her death, and ended with birth.
She awoke as she had every single night of her pregnancy, which was now in its thirtieth week: needing to pee and wanting to eat. Peeing came first, of course, if for no other reason than eating from an opened tub of ice cream while pee-bloated was a singularly unpleasant feeling.
So she flipped the covers off herself, careful to keep them on her side of the bed. Contrary to popular belief, the only guarantee in life was neither death nor taxes: it was that if she allowed any portion of her covers to stray over onto Robbie's side of the bed, he would instantly wrap them around himself like some kind of burlesque dancer's boa, making it impossible to remove from him without either waking him up and having him physically unwind himself, or simply yanking any available end of the blankets hard enough to spin him like a yo-yo, catapulting him out of bed and at the same time returning her portion of the blankets to her.
She had never, as yet, tried the yo-yo version of the solution, but there were nights when she was tempted to try.
Not tonight, though. Tonight she was extra-careful to get out of bed as slowly and quietly as possible. Robbie was a light sleeper at the best of times, and she often woke him as she went on her nightly pee-and-eat quest. Sometimes Robbie stayed awake far after she did, occasionally even going the rest of the night without a wink of sleep. But Lynette knew that he had a long day scheduled at work, and the last thing she wanted to do was send him off to his job cranky and operating at only partial capacity.
So, moving with the stealth and care of a ninja, she slipped out of the covers (careful to keep them on her side as much as possible), and then went to the bathroom. After finishing there, she crept through her and Robbie's room into the hall. She stopped there to glance into the baby's partially finished room. They had another two-plus months, so there was no crib, no mobile, no baby monitor. Just an empty room that Robbie had painted so recently that the smell of the paint still hung in the air and nauseated her if she subjected her sensitive pregnant nose to it for more than a few minutes.
Still, even though the bedroom was empty in reality, Lynette never saw it that way in her mind. She saw it as full. Not full of furniture or toys or even full of the presence of her coming child, but rather full of promise and hope. She saw the room as a sort of shrine to faith, to the knowledge-without-knowledge that a baby was coming, that it would be fine, that it would be happy and whole. Inside its walls she could imagine playing with her baby, holding its perfect fingers, tickling its perfect toes.
She could see herself as a mother, and it made her happy. Mostly because her own mother had been at best describable as lacking and probably more accurately describable as a monster. Lynette's mother had been drunk for nearly the entire time Lynette had been alive, and for much of the time before that event. Birthdays in the Hope family - for that had been her name before she married Robbie and became Lynette Randall, shedding the Hope surname like a chrysalid shedding its cocoon to emerge as a new and more beautiful being - were sordid affairs punctuated not by cake and presents but by drinking and physical and mental abuse. Lynette still walked with a slight limp from the time her mother had insisted on giving her "Birthday Spankings" that were so hard and so misplaced that one of them had broken young Lynette's femur in two places.
Nor were birthdays the only days when "accidents" could happen. Days that were too rainy, days that were too hot, days with too much humidity, or even just days where the sun rose and then set might be enough of an excuse to set Cindy Hope off on one of her almost convulsive tantrums that invariably resulted in attacks on Lynette, her only child and the only focus of her anger since Lynette's father had left the Hope home mere days before Lynette's birth.
Lynette's face furrowed at the memories, and she had to make a conscious effort to move her thoughts away from the horrors of the past and into the promises of the future.
In the master bedroom nearby, Robbie snorted and snuffled once in his sleep, then broke wind and rolled over. Lynette bit her lip to keep from laughing. Unlike many men she had met, Robbie was genteel, almost pretentiously polite when it came to the arena of bodily functions. He never "used the john," only "went to the restroom." He never "drained the lizard," only "relieved himself" - and then only when he was slightly tipsy from one to many drinks at a party. And he never, ever "farted" in front of her. Nor did he "break wind" or anything of the sort. At least, not consciously. She thought it was sort of adorable, how hard he worked at putting aside certain aspects of his maleness to make her more comfortable and more at ease.
But no quantity of good intentions could stop a person from farting in their sleep if that was what their body told them to do. Of course Robbie didn't believe it, any more than some men believed they snored. So Lynette had taped him one night, waiting for one of his "sleep toots" as she called them.
When she played the tape for him the next day, he staunchly refused to believe that any of the deep noises could possibly have come from him. The current view he was holding was that she had taped some National Geographic special about deadly gastrointestinal diseases and tried to pawn it off as him.
She let him win the argument. It didn't matter. What mattered wasn't what he did when he was asleep, it was what he did when he was awake. And when awake, there was no one more different from her mother than Robbie was. Where Cindy Hope had been a cruel, possibly even evil, harpy of a woman who went out of her way to let Lynette know at every moment that she was rotten and worthless and a waste of time, Robbie Randall was the epitome of gentleness and loving kindness. That was the main reason that Lynette was excited about her pregnancy, in fact: not just that she would have a baby, but that she would get to see Robbie be a father.
She smiled again, then took a step in the direction of the kitchen, thinking now about the ice cream that Robbie always kept stocked for what he called her "late night feedathons" - though always with a smile and a kiss to show he didn't mind, but indeed thought it rather charming and sweet that his dear wife could so easily succumb to stereotype in her pregnancy.
Not that Lynette had ever felt a need for something like tuna fish mixed in with her ice cream; nor did she eat the stuff by the quart. A small scoop of something no more exciting than cookie dough ice cream was usually enough to assuage her cravings and send her back to bed. But Robbie was definitely right in that it was a pregnancy craving: Lynette didn't much like ice cream. Or at any rate, she hadn't liked it until about six months ago, when Baskin Robbins suddenly found a place in her cell phone's speed dialer.
She walked into the kitchen, and bent over to open the freezer, which was one of the variations that was found at the bottom of the refrigerator unit, rather than the top. She felt dizzy when she did it, and immediately straightened up. She knew that if she was in the wrong position, the baby inside her could find itself resting on major blood vessels, leading to her dizziness. Usually adjusting her position was enough to stop the vertigo in a jiffy.
Not this time.
This time, straightening up just seemed to make things worse. She suddenly felt as though she couldn't breathe, felt as though she had a heavy piano sitting on her chest. She gasped. Or tried to, because surprisingly little air came into her lungs.
"Robbie," she wheezed, but knew at once that the sound had not proceeded past her own ears.
Her vision was fading now, drawing tighter and tighter in a black circle that blocked off her peripheral vision, and made it impossible for her to make out anything that wasn't directly in front of her.
Something's wrong, she thought, and knew instinctively that it had to do with the baby.
The baby's in danger!
The thought galvanized her, so that even though she was finding it harder and harder to breathe, she moved quickly to the nearby table. All thoughts of Robbie's long day and the need to let him have a full night's sleep fled from her in an instant as, with one sweep of her arm, she knocked two of the kitchen chairs over. They fell with a clatter that sounded thin and nearly silent to her ears, but that must have just been a trick played by whatever was wreaking havoc on her body, because Robbie came hustling into the kitchen in mere seconds, legs flapping beneath his boxers as he ran into the room.
"Lynny!" he shouted.
Lynette tried to speak back, tried to answer him and tell him that she couldn't breathe. But no words came. Instead, she suddenly felt her right hand grow numb. Her chest grew even tighter, though now the tightness was of a different sort than the respiratory failure that had been gripping her only a moment before.
"Honey? Honey?" said Robbie, then leapt to her side and grabbed her as Lynette pitched forward violently.
I'm having a heart attack, she thought. Not even thirty years old and I'm having a heart attack!
Then everything went dark for a minute or for an hour, and suddenly she was on the floor of her kitchen, and her feet and hands were tapping a rapid tattoo against her kitchen floor and her husband was breathing into her mouth and pounding his big hands against her chest as he performed CPR on her.
Am I not breathing? she thought.
Then all was black again, and again she could not tell how much time had passed, but when she woke she was in an ambulance, with Robbie holding tightly to her hand as a paramedic hurriedly did things that she didn't understand.
"What's going on?" she heard Robbie say, and her heart nearly broke at the anguish in his voice. Don't worry, she wanted to say to him, but when she tried all that happened was that she managed to exhale a single shallow breath before the paramedic injected her with something and again she lapsed into unconsciousness.
When she woke the next time she was shivering horrifically, her entire body spasming as though she were hypothermic, though she did not feel cold. She was aware she had a terrible taste in her mouth, though she was unaware of where she was. She groaned, and felt warmth pass between her shaking legs. She grew lightheaded at the same time and knew she was bleeding; knew she was bleeding to death, in fact.
A voice said, "She's gone hemorrhagic, get me a transfusion kit, now," and she had the sensation of all sorts of people around her, then all went dark again.
When she woke again, Robbie was there. He was white-faced and wild-eyed, products of the panic she could read in his face, but he was there, thank heaven he was there.
"Hey, hon," he whispered.
"Hey," she whispered back. Or tried to. There was something wrong with her voice. "The baby," she whispered, because she could see that there were bags of blood hanging above her, knew that everything was going wrong, knew that the baby was coming early.
"They're going to help it come soon," said Robbie, his voice choking with emotion as he said it. "Right now, in fact."
"What..." she began the question, but couldn't finish it.
"They said you have something called an amniotic fluid embolism. Some of the baby's cells got into your system, and well, your body didn't like that too much."
"Understatement," she whispered, and Robbie laughed.
The laugh turned into a sob a moment later, though, and she realized that Robbie, gentle, strong Robbie, was crying. "Please, Lord," Robbie said, his head in his hands, with her tiny, frail hand clutched between his strong ones. "Please, save my wife, save my baby."
Then once again Lynette felt as though there was a sudden increase of movement around her.
"What's going on?" said Robbie, and she wanted to reach out and comfort him, take away the pain and fear in his voice. But she couldn't move, couldn't even see much beyond the bright light that hung above her head.
I'm in a hospital, she realized. I'm in an operating room.
Then another part of her wondered if they were going to "help the baby come," as Robbie had put it, because the poor child was already dead. But no, Robbie would not have prayed for God to save the baby if there was nothing to save. Besides, she could hear someone - a doctor or a nurse, no doubt - talking to Robbie.
"Mr. Randall, you have to go now -" began the person.
"No!" shouted Robbie. "I'm not leaving her."
Then there were sounds of a scuffle, and Robbie shouted for Lynette.
Then all was dark again.
She was floating, floating. Floating in a cool place where everything was safe. She was floating in Robbie's arms. She was floating in her mother's arms, on one of the few days when her mother wasn't drunk or abusive. She was floating with her baby in her arms. She looked down and could see the baby, and he was beautiful, which surprised her. Oh, not that he was beautiful - how could he be anything but beautiful, with Robbie for a father? But that it was a he. Both she and Robbie had decided they would rather be surprised by the baby's sex, so had decided against finding out.
A boy, she thought, in the everywhere of her mind, the everyplace of her dream. A boy. His name should be Kevin, after Robbie's own daddy. Kevin Angel Randall. Because he was an angel. She was sure of it.
She looked in her arms, and looked at the baby there, and little Kevin smiled. He didn't look at her, which she thought was odd, but he smiled as though he could see something bright and marvelous just over her shoulder.
Then he reached out and she saw something in his palm. Impossibly, the newborn was holding something. And it was vaguely familiar, though she could not place it at this particular instant. It was small and dull: a dark, matted gray and misshapen object that seemed to suck light into it as she looked.
The baby looked past her still, but spoke then. It spoke, and the words it spoke were almost as strange as the object in his tiny palm. "Keep it," said the small voice. "Keep it, it's important."
Then the child closed its eyes, and disappeared from her arms, but Lynette wasn't frightened. She felt cared for, as though she were nestled in the palm of the hand of God Himself, safe and secure.
Then there was a tugging feeling, a pull at her arm, and something said, "Lynny?" and there was a bright light that raided her eyes and left them aching and sore.
"What? What?" was all she could manage.
"Thank God," came the voice. Robbie's voice, she realized. "Thank God, thank you, thank you, God."
"Robbie?" she said, blinking her eyes.
"Yeah, Lynny. I'm here."
"What happened?"
"You got sick. You had a sort of allergic reaction to the baby."
"The baby?" Lynette managed to raise herself up on one arm before falling limply back into the hospital gurney she found herself laying on. Not the same one she had been on in the ambulance, nor was it the one she had been on while in the operating room. This was a roomier version, wider and with manila plastic guardrails that had a variety of controls for raising and lowering the bed, and for controlling the television that no doubt hunched in some corner of the room like a sort of boxy night watchman.
"Shhh," sighed Robbie, pushing her deeper back into the bed. His touch was gentle, as gentle as she had ever felt it, as though he were afraid that she had suddenly transmuted from flesh to something more debilitated or effete. She was no longer human, she was a butterfly wing in woman's shape, and the merest breeze might blow her away.
"Shhh," said Robbie again. "The baby is...." His voice drifted off.
Again Lynette felt herself try to sit up. "What's wrong?" she demanded, her voice surprisingly strong. A cramp bit at her belly as she did so, and she felt a sudden strange slackness there and realized that she must have had a caesarean section. "Where's my little boy?" she said.
"He's in the neonatal intensive care unit," said Robbie.
"The NICU?" asked Lynette, feeling as though she had been punched in the stomach. Robbie nodded. "What's he doing there?"
Robbie inhaled deeply, as though trying to figure out where to start with the answer to his wife's query. "He was born too soon, first of all," he said. "Second of all -" and then he broke off and looked at her intently. "How did you know that the baby was a boy?"
Lynette flashed to the strange dream she had had what seemed only a few moments before: the beautiful boy with the lovely eyes that would not look at her, the strange object in his little hand. "I don't know," she answered honestly. "I just do."
Robbie looked at her as though he were contemplating ringing for a nurse to bring a sedative, but then continued, "...and not only was he born prematurely, but he was severely anemic."
Anemia? thought Lynette. Out loud, she said, "That doesn't sound so bad. I had a friend who was anemic, she just ate a lot of spinach."
Robbie grinned, but she could see that his heart wasn't in it. He was still trying to be strong for her, bless him. But she didn't want him to be strong right now. She wanted him to tell her what was wrong with their baby, with little Kevin Angel. "It's a bit worse than that," he said. "I didn't understand everything the doctor told me, but I gathered he was severely anemic. They had to take him to the NICU and give him an emergency transfusion."
"Transfusion?" said Lynette. She didn't even know they did that for babies.
Robbie nodded. "Lucky kid, though, he had the same blood type as you."
"How was that lucky?" asked Lynette. She was AB negative, a blood type that only about one in one hundred seventy people had, so she knew that often hospitals didn't even have the necessary supplies for transfusions of that blood type and had to settle for using O negative, the universal transfusion blood type. And she couldn't imagine that receiving a second-string blood type would be very good for a preemie.
"Because they had several AB negative donors just a few days ago. So you and the kid are getting the very best blood for your bodies." Robbie smiled a little more sincerely, then chuckled. "That was probably the most macabre sentence I've ever spoken," he said.
Lynette started to chuckle as well, then realized anew that her baby was in the NICU, the place for babies who were by definition in some kind of critical condition, and sobered.
She sobered still further when the door opened and a dour-faced doctor came into the room, followed by a nurse and....
"What's going on?" said Robbie.
"Mr. Randall?" asked one of the police officers who had followed the doctor and nurse into the room. "Could you please come with us for a bit?"
"What's going on?" This time it was Lynette asking the question, but neither the doctor, the nurse, nor the policemen seemed very intent on answering. Instead, they took out handcuffs, and placed them on Robbie's thick wrists before leading him out of the room.
"What's happening?" Lynette demanded.
"Please relax, Mrs. Randall," said the doctor. "My name is Doctor Cody, and I need to examine you."
"Examine me for what?" she asked.
Doctor Cody paused, as though unsure how to say what came next. "For the record, I can't conceive of your husband doing what we're worried he might have done. I have never seen a man more beside himself about his wife than your husband was about you. But also for the record, I don't know how we could have possibly found what we found without...." His voice drifted off.
"Without what?" she asked, putting as much venom into it as possible. It weakened her terribly, but she had just seen her husband taken away in handcuffs, for goodness sake. "What are you looking for?"
"We're," said Cody, and gulped before continuing. "We have to examine you, Mrs. Randall."
"What are you looking for? Tell me!" she entreated, falling back once again to her bed, hot tears coming to her eyes.
Doctor Cody shared a glance with the nurse, who shrugged. Then he finally looked back at Lynette and said, "Bullet wounds, Mrs. Randall. We're looking to see if you've been shot."
***